Antagonista Manifesto

"When injustice becomes law,resistance becomes duty."

"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!" -- Mario Savio

It has to start somewhere. It has to start sometime. What better place than here? What better time than now?

Welcome to Anything that defies my sense of reason.... Class antagonism of a New World Order.

....because words will always retain their power, offer the means to meaning and, for those who'll listen, the enunciation of truth, and because being sleepwalked into fascism is not an option.

To confront ideas that radically alter our perception of the world is one of life's most unsettling yet liberating experiences.

Throw away your ambitions for membership to the socially acceptable position of wage slave.

"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; the right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media regardless of frontiers." -- Article 19

Words of Wisdom

"Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders…and millions have been killed because of this obedience… Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves… (and) the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem." - Howard Zinn

"If the truth can be told in a way so as to be understood, it will be believed." - Terence McKenna

"The eternal fight is not many battles fought on one level but one great battle fought on many different levels." - The Antagonist

"Besides, I think it's time to abolish politicians entirely and let everbody participate in self-government via Internet. We needed representatives in the 18th Century, because we couldn't all go to Washington. Meanwhile, times changed and our "representatives" have sold us out to the corporations, as we in the majority party all agree, whatever our differences in other matters. And we don't need "representatives" anymore; we have the Net technology to represent ourselves." - Robert Anton Wilson

"There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible but, in the end, they always fall - think of it. Always." - Mohandas Gandhi

"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in times of comfort and convenience, but where he stands in times of challenge and controversy. Cowardice asks the question: Is it safe? Expedience asks the question: Is it politic? Vanity asks the question: Is it popular? But conscience asks the question: Is it right? And a time comes when man must take a stand that’s neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but one must take it because it’s right.” – Martin Luther King Jr.

"Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same. More than one person, doubtless like me, writes in order to have no face." — Michel Foucault

"You're obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That's the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world." — Octave Mirbeau

"We have given away far too many freedoms in order to be free. Now it's time to take some back." - John le Carre

“We need to work like the Zapatistas do, like ants who go everywhere no matter which political party the other belongs to. Zapatistas proved people can work together in spite of differences.” - Anna Esther Cecena of the FZLN (Mexican support committee of the Zapatistas)

"Condemnation without investigation is the height of ignorance." - Albert Einstein

"The problem with always being a conformist is that when you try to change the system from within, it's not you who changes the system; it's the system that will eventually change you." - Immortal Technique

"The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed." - Stephen Bantu Biko

"An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it." - Mohandas Gandhi

"The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie -- deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought". - John F. Kennedy

"There is no general legal duty to assist the police or to obey police instructions." - Rice v Connolly [1966] 2 QB 414

"All great truths begin as blasphemies." - George Bernard Shaw

"Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence." - Albert Einstein

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you... then you win." - Mohandas Gandh

"Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." - George Orwell

"No one understood better than Stalin that the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade, but to produce a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the first trace of unorthodox thought immediately reveals itself as a jarring dissonance." - Leonard Schapiro

“If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.” - Benjamin Franklin

"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." - Arthur Schopenhauer

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." - Dr. Martin Luther King

"There is no act too small, no act too bold. The history of social change is the history of millions of actions, small and large, coming together at points in history and creating a power that governments cannot suppress." - Howard Zinn

"We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men." - George Orwell

"Any fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius-and a lot of courage-to move in the opposite direction." - Albert Einstein

"The power of accurate observation is often called cynicism by those who have not got it." - George Bernard Shaw

"To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the virtue nor the wisdom to do so. To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorised, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolised, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; And to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonoured. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality." - PJ Proudhon

"It's only subliminal if you don't notice it." - The Antagonist

Public Private Partnership

UK PLC Saving Banks

23 February 2005

These were the words a Sony Music executive uttered to The Register back in 1998. Seven years and lots of legal threats later, not much appears to have changed if the furore about Steal This File Sharing Book by Wallace Wang is anything to go by. Wang's book explains, in old fashioned printing-press form, how to use a bunch of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks for finding whatever it is a user of these networks might be looking for.

So what? Well, the hubbub that surrounds this book brings me to a pertinent point that doesn't seem to have received a whole lot of coverage in the peer-to-peer debate thus far, and it's a point that needs bringing to the consiousness of the masses before we all lose sight of the facts, such as they are.

Traditional media coverage of peer-to-peer networking technologies and issues has concentrated on the trading of music as MP3 files thanks to the narrow focus afforded to the issue by the Recording Industry Ass. of America (RIAA) in their various attempts to sue peer-to-peer users in America. More recently, the trading of movies has entered the peer-to-peer debate thanks to moves by the Motion Picture Ass. of America (MPAA) to follow the RIAA's lead in attempting to sue users of peer-to-peer networks.

However, this isn't quite the full story. In fact, it's quite a long way from the full story because peer-to-peer technologies are far more useful than a cursory glance at the actions of the RIAA/MPAA would first suggest. These two organisations represent the interests of the music and film industries - in America - and that's it!

Peer-to-peer networks aren't quite so limited in their scope - they can carry music and films, and they can also carry books, games, applications, utilities, talks, speeches, presentations, photographs - in fact, anything that can be turned into a file on a computer. Not only that, but file sharing networks enable these files to be distributed far beyond the borders and industries within which the jurisdictions of the likes of the RIAA and MPAA fall.

So, what happens to all the games, books and software that end up on peer to peer networks? What about shared music, films, games, books and applications in all the countries in the world outside of America?

As a result of the misguided efforts of the RIAA and MPAA, the laborious and costly process of finding a source of potential infringement, attempting to locate the specific individual responsible, and issuing proceedings against that individual has been born. Each stage of the process is fraught with well documented difficulties and, thus far, we're only talking about music and films being traded within America's borders. Nor have we accounted for the process of dragging each of these alleged infringers through the courts.

This convoluted process might work relatively well for a handful of individuals in a single country, but try applyling the concept to the ever-growing millions upon millions of peer-to-peer users users that span the globe and that share music, films, games, applications, books, etc., and you can see how the notion of each industry suing alleged offenders quickly renders itself entirely redundant. Really, people, you can't sue everyone, everywhere, forevermore.

The RIAA have thrown their weight around on a few high profile occasions in true 'women and children first' fashion by suing kids, mothers and even dead grandmothers. Now the MPAA are adopting the same approach as the music industry in their quest to maintain the huge profits that holding a captive audience to ransom for decades has allowed them to reap and are suing their customers too.

Sure, both the RIAA and MPAA are big, scary organisations with lots of money at their disposal to protect their highly profitable racketeering industries - and if you've bought or rented any music or films, ever, it's your money. In reality, their only weapon is fear, and by committing themselves to this perverse die-not-adapt logic, the music and film industries of America have decisively committed to a superbly flawed method of attempting to preserve themselves in the face of technological developments that they cannot hope to survive in their existing incarnations.

As Wang writes (and anyone with a decent grasp of simple logic can fathom):

"The bottom line is that the corporations, who currently hold all the power and make most of the money, are going to have to change, and that's something they aren't willing to do."

In reality, change is something that the corporations should have embraced a long time ago when MP3 evolution and MP3 portability were fledgling technologies. For the best part of ten years change hasn't been an option and, as Wang concludes in his book:

"The question isn't whether file sharing technology will put today's corporate powerhouses out of business. The question is when, and that future is closer than they think."

Of this fact peer-to-peer users everywhere should take heed.

The media giants have made their choices and decided that they would rather die than adapt. In sounding their own death knell the corporate behemoths have also issued a resounding message to peer-to-peer users everywhere - share your files or we've won.

--Note: A sample chapter of Steal This File Sharing Book offering an overview of the peer-to-peer file-sharing network technologies is available from the No Starch web site for anyone that's interested. No doubt a full version of the book will be available on your friendly file sharing network soon!

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Antagonista Zeitgeist

"The country's biggest force, the Metropolitan police || believe that large sections of the population have become increasingly politicised, and there is a growing sense that the current restrictions on demonstrations are too light." - The Guardian

"The bombers scattered identity and bank cards around the Tube carriages they targeted before placing their rucksacks on the floor and setting off the explosives. || Although they were damaged to some extent, they [the ID and bank cards] did not show the damage that would be expected if they were on the body of the bomber or in the rucksack, suggesting that in each case they had been deliberately separated by some distance from the actual explosion. || The bombers were not wearing the rucksacks at the time of the explosions, but had instead put them down on the floor of the bus and Tube trains." - The Telegraph

"But it [de Menezes execution MPS trial] was nearly derailed after an armed police raid on the home of a juror's ex-boyfriend in the second week of the case, in which the female juror's baby was taken away." - Daily Mail

"It is no exaggeration to say that at the time of the arrest there was not one shred of admissible evidence against Barot. The arrest was perfectly lawful - there were more than sufficient grounds, but in terms of evidence to put before a court, there was nothing. There then began the race against time to retrieve evidence from the mass of computers and other IT equipment that we seized. It was only at the very end of the permitted period of detention that sufficient evidence was found to justify charges. I know that some in the media were sharpening their pencils, and that if we had been unable to bring charges in that case, there would have been a wave of criticism about the arrests. Barot himself of course eventually pleaded guilty last year and received a 40-year sentence." – DAC Peter Clarke

The 7/7 narrative: "06.49: The 4 men .... each put on rucksacks || 07:14: .... The 4 then put on their rucksacks...." More....

"The [21/7] jury were told a further charge of conspiracy to cause explosions likely to endanger life, faced by each man, was now being left off the indictment." – BBC

"Tony Blair and his family suffered the indignity of having to sleep on the floor and eat an Indian takeaway out of foil cartons on their last night in Downing Street, insiders have revealed." – The Times